LINCOLN CENTER FESTIVAL REVIEW

LINCOLN CENTER FESTIVAL REVIEW; Sifting Through the Splinters of a Fragmented World

By BEN BRANTLEY

Published: July 23, 2004

A single, lonesome eye is all that is initially seen of the title character in ''The Elephant Vanishes,'' the mind-scrambling collage of a play adapted by the magical British director Simon McBurney from short stories by Haruki Murakami. Immense and somber in fading shades of gray, a filmed image of the eye glides across the stage of the New York State Theater, where the show runs through Sunday, tantalizing and somehow terribly sad in its incompleteness.

The missing elephant -- which you are told has disappeared from a zoo in the suburbs of Tokyo -- rematerializes in a bewildering variety of forms in this exquisitely assembled multimedia work, a collaboration between Mr. McBurney's Complicite company and the Setagaya Public Theater of Japan. The animal shows up as everything from a childlike outline, drawn by the tale's narrator, to a remarkable pantomime creature briefly summoned into being by members of the ensemble with the help of a few office chairs.

But even as a full photographic figure, projected onto the back of the stage, the elephant always eludes your complete apprehension, like a shard of memory from early childhood. For in Mr. McBurney and the designer Michael Levine's fluent interpretation of Mr. Murakami's portraits of urban alienation, the world comes at you in pieces that never entirely cohere. And the Tokyo citizens evoked by the company's seven protean performers (whose words, in Japanese, are translated via English supertitles) are most notable for the ways they fail to connect -- not only with one another and their environment, but also with their own fragmented selves.

Mr. Murakami, whose fiction includes ''Norwegian Wood'' and ''Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World,'' has been a best-selling author in Japan for more than a decade, capturing the anomie of a generation weaned on an increasingly advanced and dehumanizing technology. His popularity with the young, like that of Kurt Vonnegut in the 1970's, has much to do with his gift for making obscurity accessible. He presents existential enigmas with heavy doses of whimsy that occasionally border on cuteness.

There are traces of such preciousness in the stage production of ''The Elephant Vanishes,'' a highlight of the Lincoln Center Festival 2004. The story of a newly married couple who wake up hungry in the middle of the night and decide to rob a McDonald's feels a tad too perky in its craziness. But even that vignette affects you on levels that you don't entirely appreciate until after the show is over, when its images keep unfolding and expanding in your mind.

As in previous works like ''The Street of Crocodiles'' and ''The Noise of Time,'' Mr. McBurney orchestrates all manner of visual and auditory elements to discover the pattern in disconnection, or as he puts it, ''the order of chaos.'' The three overlapping tales told here deploy sophisticated lighting (by Paul Anderson) and sound (Christopher Shutt), as well as film and videotaped projections that in their blurring of live and recorded action bring to mind the internationally influential style of the New York troupe Wooster Group.

But there is also something purely and traditionally theatrical in the show that seems especially appropriate to the depiction of a Tokyo in which a centuries-old aesthetic infuses computer-dominated homes. The subtle, simple use Mr. McBurney makes of shadows on shoji screens, for example, is every bit as effective as the blurred color film that evokes the experience of driving fast through downtown Tokyo.

Such varied artistic tools, echoed by a musical score that ranges from the soundtrack of ''Bullitt'' to a Shostakovich cello concerto, convey a relentless fusion and fission of the senses. Everything blurs into everything else, but never into a whole. (It is a dark joke that the narrator of the elephant story is a home appliance salesman whose commercial watchword is unity.) And there is an abiding feeling of people out of touch with primal appetites and biological rhythms.

The man whose wife persuades him to rob a McDonald's of hamburgers is split into two actors; one hovers over scenes from the man's life and his visions of floating on a river. And a housewife who can no longer sleep and devotes her nights to reading and rereading ''Anna Karenina'' is embodied by at least four actresses simultaneously (in addition to the two-dimensional self captured by her video diary), who view her routinized domestic ritual with cruel clinical detachment.

The film noir-ish conclusion of the insomniac's tale may superficially resemble an old episode from ''The Twilight Zone'' or ''Alfred Hitchcock Presents.'' But it works on a deeper, more unsettling level, in which the notions of sleep and death, warped by a world where there is no longer a division between night and day, have become interchangeable.

As I was writing this, by the way, I paused to look out the window of my apartment. I swear I saw the same woman, in duplicate, on different sides of the street below. And I had had a good night's sleep. This morning-after apparition gives you some idea of the infectious and persistent potency of the vision behind ''The Elephant Vanishes.''

THE ELEPHANT VANISHES

Inspired by stories by Haruki Murakami. A Complicite co-production with the Setagaya Public Theater. Directed by Simon McBurney; design by Michael Levine; lighting by Paul Anderson; sound by Christopher Shutt; projections, Ruppert Bohle and Anne O'Connor; costumes by Christina Cunningham; associate director, Catherine Alexander; production manager, Nick Schwartz-Hall; technical managers, Jumpei Fukuda and Sonoko Yamamoto; company stage manager, Catherine Binks; stage manager, Yu Fujisaki. Performed in Japanese with English supertitles. Part of the Lincoln Center Festival 2004. At the New York State Theater, Lincoln Center.